New Lesson: TextFSM

[smk4664]

What Type of Issue Is This?: This is for new lesson content covering Google's TextFSM module. The first stages will cover the rules for TextFSM. The later stages will hopefully show how to integrate into Netmiko.

Idea for new content

Should this be assigned to you?: Yes

Additional information:

The goal of this lesson is to give the reader an understanding of using TextFSM to retrieve data from a device using the CLI in a structured format for when alternate methods (NetConf, ReSTConf) are not available. At the end of this lesson, the reader will have an understanding of TextFSM, how to write there own TextFSM templates and how to use the TextFSM templates in Netmiko.

The first stage will define TextFSM and give the role that TextFSM fills (taking the semi-structured data that a device returns and formatting it into a Python Data structure).

The second stage will assist in building a basic TextFSM file and show the minimum required for the python TextFSM module to parse. This stage will both define the TextFSM rules as well as a link to the wiki that Google put together for the TextFSM module.

The third stage will put this information together to build a simple template to work on a basic show command. This will use just the TextFSM library and a fake device to control the output.

The fourth stage will show an advanced example on TextFSM and possibly show an example of parsing config from the device. This stage will also link to the NTC TextFSM templates for more examples.

The fifth stage will provide an example of using TextFSM in Netmiko to show a real-world example.

[Mierdin]

Eww........(i kid, i kid 😄 )

SGTM

[smk4664]

This went stale for a while, but I plan on putting in a PR or two for NRELabs during Hacktoberfest. This will very likely be one I pick back up.

[Mierdin]

Sounds good. The preview service is currently running on the new cluster, let me know if you have problems. I am hoping that in the next few months I can also incorporate image builds into the pipeline so we don't have to merge new/changed images before previews work.